This article examines the real convergence hypothesis in some Central and East European countries (both towards the German and the US economies) by means of using time series techniques during the period 1950 to 2003. No evidence is found of real convergence for the whole period. However, when...

This article contributes to the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) and excess consumption smoothness debate in the context of fractional integration. We show that the excess consumption smoothness result is a consequence of the quarterly data frequency commonly employed in the empirical work. In...